The idea is simple but powerful: give students a personal space online to pose questions, publish work in progress and link to and comment on relevant resources. It also gives them a way to find and link up with other learners with similar interests to create an ad-hoc learning community.

This is the thinking behind a cutting-edge project known as Elgg, which is attempting to combine social software such as weblogs and wikis to produce software specifically for education - software that could help reshape e-learning into something far more personal and social.

"Elgg is all about a learner-centred, learner-controlled space in which you choose the connections, the resources and the communities you want to participate in," says David Tosh, one of its creators.

The idea was conceived in late 2003, when Ben Werdmuller and Tosh were working at Edinburgh University developing e-learning and e-portfolio systems. Werdmuller (an avid blogger) persuaded Tosh (who had just started a PhD in e-portfolios) to start a blog of his own to support his studies. Within a week, Tosh had received comments on his blog from people pointing him to relevant resources and others bloggers had begun to link to him.

Drawing on this experience, Tosh and Werdmuller published a paper describing a new kind of e-portfolio based on personal publishing and social networking. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The duo then set about creating Elgg (named after a small village in Switzerland) and released it under an open source licence, meaning it is free to use and the code can be edited by anyone. Since then, thanks to a small team of volunteer programmers and an active user community, Elgg has developed a rich set of features.

A new Elgg user starts by creating a digital identity: announcing who they are, and what they are interested in. Then any content published by the user (such as a blog entry or uploaded file) can be assigned freely chosen keywords (a process known as tagging). The software then uses these tags to help to connect the user to other learners with similar interests.

In addition, a user can start a community, which other learners can then join. For example, a course leader could start a subject-based community to highlight potential reading materials to a group of learners. Elgg also includes the ability to publish a podcast and a way for users to subscribe to content elsewhere on the web.

The learner-centric approach and social networking aspect of Elgg make it very different from more traditional virtual learning environments (VLEs), which are usually structured around courses, timetables and assessment. "Whereas Elgg is learner-centred, the VLE systems tend to be centred around the requirements of an institution," says Werdmuller.

Elgg offers learners more autonomy but is not intended to replace the VLE. "We think of it as more of an enhancement," says Tosh.

Pilot tests the potential

At Leeds University, Dr Terry Wassall is part of an informal research group that has been running a pilot of Elgg. "As well as exploring Elgg's potential to support teaching, academic staff are interested in how the software can be used to support research and project groups, communities of interest, and individuals' research and career development," he says.

Elgg encourages students "to develop an online presence" and writing for and commenting on blogs "requires a style of writing that is reflective, clear and concise. It helps students to find and develop a particular type of public 'voice' as well as communication and presentational skills."

Writing a blog entry or uploading a file with Elgg is no more complicated than sending an email. But what makes Elgg different is that it allows users to decide exactly who can view their content.

"Different levels of access can be set for individual blog entries, so some posts can be fully public and others only readable by a particular group or individual, such a private post to a dissertation student or their supervisor," says Wassall.

The independent, self-directed style of learning that Elgg supports makes it well suited to higher education, where students are expected to take on greater responsibility for their own learning. However, the software has also recently found its way into an independent primary for girls in Surrey. The deputy head and systems manager of St Ives school, Haslemere, Surrey, Miles Berry (the winner of the 2006 Becta ICT in Practice Award for Primary Teaching), started using Elgg with his year 6 students last September.

Berry has used Elgg, for example, for a discussion about the day's drama lesson, what it is like to be back at school after the holidays and the responsibility of being a house captain.

To introduce students to Elgg's weblog functionality, Berry set various tasks, such as writing a book review. However, he is keen to stress that the real strength of the software compared with more traditional VLEs is that "much of the control is handed to the pupils themselves", as they get to choose what they write about and whether to share their work with the rest of the class, "giving them a far stronger sense of ownership".

&middot Stephen O'Hear is a fellow for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.